Oula Lehtinen is one of Draivi’s founding members and the force behind its performance marketing engine. He leads customer acquisition across multiple markets, including Finland, Spain, and most recently Mexico.
Want to know how a Finnish scale-up became one of Europe's fastest growing companies and reached an incredible €1 million in revenue per employee? We started by identifying the right challenge to solve.
At Draivi, a performance marketing company specialising in the fintech market, our challenge was this: Not all customers looking for a finance product are eligible. So, regardless of volume or demand, we needed to find the right customers at the right time to grow profitably.
To find the right customers, the ones that are eligible and with the highest lifetime value, we started by reassessing our data strategy. We had a huge amount of user data, but we weren't using it cleverly. So, we changed that.
The strategic shift: Finding the right customers with AI
We built a data-first system using AI to identify and attract customers with the highest predicted customer lifetime value. Our internal platform uses AI to analyse customer behaviour and to forecast which new users are likely to be our most valuable in the long run.
While our platform is custom-built, the core principle is simple. Marketers should move beyond tracking basic conversions and instead measure the true, long-term value of each customer. This allows you to feed more meaningful data back to Google Ads, helping its AI find prospects that are not just likely to convert, but likely to be profitable over time.
You can achieve this in a few ways:
- Assign conversion values: In Google Ads, you can assign a value to different conversion actions. For example, a completed sale is a higher-value conversion than a lead form submission. By assigning specific values, you teach Google's AI which conversions matter most to your business.
- Connect your data: Connect your in-house data, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) system or analytics platform, directly to Google Ads. This allows you to track which leads turn into high-value customers and feed that information back to Google's AI, like Performance Max.
- Support the customer journey: We looked at data signals from people’s first interaction with us to long-term engagement. This helped us make smart decisions in ad auctions.
We fed our existing data, as well as predictive customer lifetime data based on the user behaviour mentioned above, into Performance Max. It is a goal-based campaign type that uses AI to serve ads across all of Google’s advertising channels — and it helped us to find more converting customers.
Marketers should move beyond tracking basic conversions and instead measure the true, long-term value of each customer.
A search-based system: Performance Max and broad match
This move to Performance Max, meant we stopped manually adjusting ads and instead let the AI-powered tool automatically find people similar to our most valuable customers.
Think of it like fishing in the sea instead of a pond. We know that 15% of Google searches are new every day and just targeting a keyword like "personal loan" isn't enough. Users' searches are more conversational and specific and that’s where Performance Max steps in, using your audience signals to find new potential customers who exhibit characteristics similar to your most valuable audiences.
This change allowed us to take more calculated risks with ad spending, confident in getting our investments back.
In fact, our Performance Max campaigns alone drove a 72% increase in revenue and a 58% increase in new users, all while keeping advertising costs stable.
To find even more relevant customers, we added broad match into the mix. Instead of only targeting a phrase like “low-interest personal loan”, broad match enabled us to discover new, high-value searches we may not have considered.
For example, a user in Germany searching “welche deutsche bank finanziert immobilien im ausland” (“which german bank finances property abroad”) was exploring options for buying real estate overseas — a major life milestone that can require flexible financing. Broad match’s AI understood that they were looking for services like ours.
In Finland, someone searching for “veronpalautus ennakkoon” (“tax refund in advance”) was looking for ways to access upcoming funds earlier. Broad match connected them with our solutions that fit their plans.
The results: Efficiency, growth, and recognition
Once our system worked well in Finland, we saw its potential for global expansion. We used the same approach to enter new international markets, and now Germany and Spain are doing even better than Finland.
And that’s not the only result we saw. One we’re incredibly proud of is reaching over €1 million in revenue per employee.
In 2022, with 10 full-time employees, Draivi had €9.3 million in revenue. By 2023, with 13 employees, revenue leaped to €17 million. Last year, 18 employees generated €20 million, and this year, with around 28 employees, we are aiming for €30 million.
This shows how our smart, automated system allowed a relatively small team to create huge value by focusing only on the most profitable customers.
AI is now also a core part of our culture, giving us access to creative resources, content generation, and automation that once needed entire teams. We believe this changes the game. We are actively looking into new AI features, including Google's video generation tool Veo 3 in Gemini, to make our creative output even better.
Looking ahead, we plan to deepen our presence in existing high-growth markets, like Germany and Spain. We are also investing more in our data capabilities, including hiring a Head of Analytics, to continuously improve our marketing data platform and get even more valuable insights.
